The rapidly growing Internet of Things (IoT) industry is producing networked devices in many different industries and for many different applications, such as, medical applications, automobiles, smart cities, banking authentication, and physiological health monitoring. The demand for secure, impenetrable data transfer between networked devices is critical. For example, balancing privacy, safety, and security is key in the health industries, particularly for implantable medical devices and body area networks. Accordingly, there has been significant research exploring software enabled security measures and physiological values as an input to cryptographic keys. However, hardware and sensor interfaces may still be targets for malicious attacks.
Currently, a package is hard routed once manufactured and any device attached to the microelectronics has its physical electrical contacts permanently affixed. In some cases fuses may be added to the package. Upon completion of the fabrication of the package, the fuses may be blown to permanently set signal pathways between the devices on the package. Since the data pathways are permanently set, data security enforcement is controlled on the device (e.g., within the die or memory) in conjunction with the preset physical hardware attributes developed during processing (e.g., the unique performance differentials between pairs of circuits at sixty-four different location for one-hundred-twenty-eight bit encryption) and/or in conjunction with software layer protocols that can leverage a plurality of inputs.
However, knowledge of internal hardware and sensor configurations may be used by adversaries to attack the system. For example, sensor systems implicitly trust that physical contact with the sensor is needed to alter the signal, but active attackers may introduce remote interference to sensing in order to affect responses. One such attack may include injecting an electromagnetic signal that mimics a cardiac wave form from centimeters away from a pacemaker. The malicious electromagnetic signal may result in the pacemaker generating an unnecessary therapeutic response, possibly severely harming the user.